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Backlink "spam" from legitimate sites

by nettiapina
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I'm quite new to this backlink tracking stuff. This is a straightforward question, I'm not trying to hide any factoids here.

I made two comments on two separate blogs with my name and website URL. Both are legitimate and long-running sites, and about the topics I might cover myself (content marketing and web development). For those two comments I got roughly 660 new backlinks to my site (according to Majestic). Apparently these two blogs both have misconfigured widgets / custom code that directly links to my site from footer and sidebar for no good reason. Currently I'm linked from every damn piece of content on these two sites. The more famous one doesn't even nofollow their links.

My Majestic Trust score came crashing down sometime after this, and Moz's scores were affected a bit. Don't know if this is the culprit. I've had very large increase in backlinks relative to what I had before, so Ahrefs' graph obviously looks quite bad.

Would you say this is hazardous? Can you actually trigger some sort of a penalty for this? Would it be an overreaction to disavow the sites?

The owners were easy to reach and I've notified them. Also, I'm eventually going to lose the links once they get a bit more comments, but that might take a while.
#backlink #legitimate #sites #spam
  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    No takers? Well, the situation seems much worse than what I thought. The simplistic view above was from Majestic SEO (mostly), but according to Ahrefs I've got about 3700 new links from the worst offender alone. It's not enough that their widget is done poorly, but apparently every piece of content is accessible through several different URLs... Unfortunately the owner of the worst "link spammer" is also unresponsive.

    Thanks to these two blogs my December looks quite interesting in Ahrefs stats. I guess it's going to get back to normal in some point.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

      Unfortunately the owner of the worst "link spammer" is also unresponsive.
      Really? You are going to call them a 'link spammer'? You built the links. Not them.

      Blog commenting for links is nothing but low quality crap.

      Most sites have a widget for 'recent comments' in their sidebar or footer. It is not configured incorrectly. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Majestic and Ahrefs just happened to spider the sites at the time when your comment was listed in the widget. So they are showing a link from each page.

      It's no big deal. First of all, what Ahrefs and Majestic sees is not the same thing Google sees. Those links will probably stay in the databases of Ahrefs and Majestic long after they are gone. Those two services are pretty bad at removing links that have dropped off from their data. I would expect to see them for months after the links are gone.

      Second, it does not matter if your Moz and Majestic scores dropped. Those have zero impact on rankings. I wouldn't worry about it.

      Anyhow, I wouldn't worry about it. If you are going to do blog commenting for links, you are going to have big spikes in links sometimes because of this. Even if Google sees the same thing, not a huge deal. By the next time they spider the site, your comment will most likely have dropped off the 'recent comments' widget and your links will no longer be there.
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      • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
        Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

        Really? You are going to call them a 'link spammer'? You built the links. Not them.

        Blog commenting for links is nothing but low quality crap.
        Thanks for the reply! I'm trying to not worry about it.

        A bad choice of words on "spamming". Sorry about that.

        Commenting only to get a bunch of links wasn't my intention, even if that particular comment wasn't the most insightful I've made. ("Wow! So CMS! Such features!") Of course the link is nice, but in this case I'm using my domain to identify me and my company because the other users are from potential partners and competitors, and because I've participated in the studies that the linking site has been doing (about the kind of WordPress companies there are for example). It's been a slow month for that blog so the comment is still sitting there.
        Signature
        Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
        Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

        What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author johnbrown12
    Agree with Mike
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  • Profile picture of the author IMdeaming
    Out of pure curiosity,did you ever think to simply make more comments to push yours off the recent list?...
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    Something stinks...
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Originally Posted by IMdeaming View Post

      Out of pure curiosity,did you ever think to simply make more comments to push yours off the recent list?...
      I did actually do that, but the comment has not been approved yet. The blog also has some sort of Twitter-to-comment system and I did post their most recent article on my both Twitter accounts, but that didn't accomplish anything either. I guess the site owner is just busy with his life.
      Signature
      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[8861878].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Like Mike said it's no big deal, your comments will eventually be bumped off by newer comments.
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  • Profile picture of the author netanel23
    There is no reason to freak out about this, your link will fall off of the "recent" comment lists as more comments are added to the website.

    You are taking this linkbuilding thing way to seriously if you get worked up about stuff like this.

    Relax.
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